Followers

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Memento

This one isn’t actually old enough to fall into the Movies I’ve Missed category, but it’s close enough, and anyway, that ten-year-cutoff I mentioned a while back isn’t a hard and fast rule. Even if it was, it’s my rule, so I can change it.

As for the movie itself, I’ve wanted to watch it ever since it came out and finally got around to it. As someone who struggles with short-term memory myself from time to time, I can sympathize with the protagonist, who has no short-term memory at all and is still trying to track down his wife’s killer. MEMENTO got as much notice for its structure as for anything else, I think, and it’s certainly odd, since each scene ends where the previous scene began . . . or something like that. I watched it last night, and I’m still a little confused. But the plot basically runs backwards, and given that, you’d think it would be impossible to have a surprise ending. MEMENTO manages to do just that, though, and it’s quite an achievement in storytelling.

I like Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano, and they’re both fine here. Director Christopher Nolan has gone on to much bigger things (Batman movies). I think he could have picked up the pace a little in this one. Overall, MEMENTO is one of those movies that I admired quite a bit, but it’s hard to say that I actually enjoyed it. It’s so odd that that mixed reaction may be the best I can do. But I’m glad I saw it after all this time.

8 comments:

I saw this movie when it first came out and after I got over my initial response of "what the...", I LOVED it. Funny, I haven't seen it played on cable or any of the movie channels at all. Maybe because it's so odd - I think it's a candidate for Turner Classic Movies eventually. Fell in love with Pantoliano in this movie - brilliant.

This is one of my favorite films of the last decade. Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it more. I had to watch it twice myself when it originally came out and picked up tidbits that I had missed the first time around.

I was blown away by the film when it came out. I'll confess that I had to see it twice to fully get everything down, (which allowed me to catch a few things that I missed) but I thought it was the best film released that year. Based on a pretty cool short story by Nolan's brother, that can be read on-line.